Pre-publication draft September 2023 of citizens, who — as in the case of Nubians in Kenya, Haitians in the Dominican Republic and Rohingyas in Myanmar — may not receive state recognition, and thus be rendered precarious. Arbitrary and overly demanding evidentiary standards and procedures have weakened the security of citizenship status, rendering numerous citizens precarious.15 This chapter, though, seeks to illuminate a different facet of precarious citizenship in India. This form of precariousness arises not so much from the formal procedures, which, being arbitrary or discriminatory, formally revoke or threaten to revoke citizenship status. Rather, this chapter focusses on precarious citizenship that is produced by the insidious exercise of state power, which makes citizenship status inoperable for vulnerable minority populations rather than formally revoking it. The chapter draws from the critical citizenship studies tradition to characterize this form of precarity as ‘irregular citizenship’. Precarious citizens in India may formally continue to be citizens. But as citizens whose citizenship is being irregularized, they are unable to access material and legal goods attached to formal citizenship. This includes their inability, due to official practices, to obtain legal redress based on the normal application of legality. Irregular citizenship is thus neither a status of non-citizenship nor in-betweenness: rather, it is a condition. This precariousness is marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. It is not marked by transitory or shifting legal identity, but a state of suspended animation constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms. This chapter argues that the contemporary mass irregularization of Indian citizens has resulted from the historically evolving processes of racialization and exceptionalism. The matter of states irregularizing citizenship, as in the case of India, is not only a story of heightened and overly arduous legal standards that have weakened citizenship security. It is more profoundly about states refusing to apply constitutional due process norms to the citizenship status of stigmatised minorities. State authorities in India — both the government and the courts — have framed citizenship policies in the language of legality. But they have consistently and decisively placed them in the space outside the ordinary process of law. The first section introduces the history and contours of the Indian citizenship regime. There has been a growing paranoia, particularly since the 1980s, that alleged illegal immigration from Bangladesh, first in Assam and then across the country, was altering religious and ethnic demography. This paranoia in Assam resulted from the fear among socially dominant groups of loss of their political dominance. Outside Assam, right-wing political parties politicised this issue as a religious threat posed by Muslims. I argue that these political developments triggered a process of racialization of Bengali-origin minorities in Assam, and more specifically Bengaliorigin Muslims or Miyas. By the early 2000s, this racialization came to be fused with the discourse of national security, which legitimized exceptional procedures that increasingly subjected the citizenship of a vast number of Indians to extraordinary legal procedures. The Indian state has instrumentalized these procedures to eventually dispossess citizens of the ordinary legal and material goods attached to Indian citizenship. The subsequent sections give two examples of India’s institutions, in the context of racialization and exceptionalism, irregularizing citizens. These sections show how the courts 15 See generally Benjamin N Lawrence and Jacqueline Stevens (eds), Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke UP 2017). 4 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4111014